Month June 2013

How Drucker Thought About Complexity ~ The pace of change is accelerating and the degree of uncertainty increasing. Perhaps a new rationale will be required to drive institutional success in the future. Perhaps we need to move from a rationale of scalable efficiency to one of scalable learning — designing institutions and architectures of relationships across institutions that help all participants to learn faster as more participants join. via Harvard Business Review, published June 25, 2013.

Innovation: The History of a Buzzword ~ The word innovation might be mantra of business leaders but the irony behind the king of buzzwords is that, originally, “innovation” wasn’t a compliment. It was an accusation. via The Atlantic, published June 20, 2013.

Reframe How You Think About Failure by Changing Its Definition ~ You’re fallible and you don’t have all the answers. Knowing how to accept and process failures, screw-ups, and unknowns will help you use them to your advantage. Recognizing them as normal and often necessary to success is key. via LifeHacker, published June 27, 2013.

What Is Design If Not Human-Centered? ~ The explosive growth of interest in human-centered design raises bigger questions about traditional design education, training, and practice. via Stanford Social Innovation Review, published June 25, 2013.

Disrupt NSA Surveillance With This Typeface ~ The ZXX typeface, created by Sang Mun, is embedded with disruptive designs that are meant to combat optical character recognition processes. ” ZXX is a call to action, both practically and symbolically, to raise questions about privacy, But it represents a broader urgency: How can design be used politically and socially for the codification and de-codification of people’s thoughts? What is a graphic design that is inherently secretive? How can graphic design reinforce privacy? And, really, how can the process of design engender a proactive attitude towards the future — and our present for that matter?” via Hyperallergic, published June 27, 2013.

WATCH

Poetry Bombing by Augustina Woodgate ~ Augustina Woodgate targets lonely thrift stores and gives the well-worn clothing new life by sewing poems into them. via Lost At E Minor, published June 27, 2013.

Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation is a five-week course that will introduce you to the concepts of human-centered design and help you use the design process to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change. No prior design experience necessary.

Please note that registration for the course ends on July 3rd and that you must register as a team of at least two. Team members must be in the same location as you will need to be able to physically meet for workshops.

Ask Great Questions: Leadership Skills of Socrates ~ Socrates holds the key to an essential leadership skill: asking great questions. The challenge is that too few leaders, managers and employees ask great questions. This is a big problem. Cultures that embrace a culture of questioning thrive and those that fear it either fail or are doomed to mediocrity. Here are 7 basics ingredients to nurture this Socratic culture. via Forbes, published June 18, 2013.

The Bossless Office Trend ~ A nonhierarchical workplace may just be a more creative and happier one. “Management is a term to me that feels very twentieth century,” says Simon Anderson, the CEO of the web-hosting company DreamHost, “That 100-year chunk of time when the world was very industrialized, and a company would make something that could be stamped out 10 million times and figured out a way to ship it easily, you needed the hierarchy for that. I think this century is more about building intelligent teams.” via New York Magazine, published June 16, 2013.

The Worry That You’re Doing The Wrong Thing Right Now ~ You begin one task from an email, but then quickly have the urge to see if there’s something else more important you should be doing. And this problem repeats itself—every time you sit down with one thing, the dozens of others on your mind (and the many potential urgent items that might be coming in as you sit there) are grasping for your attention. Is there ever any certainty that you’re doing the right thing right now? via Design Taxi, published June 17, 2013.

The Best Thing We Could Do About Inequality Is Universal Preschool ~ The latest research, from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by James Heckman and Lakshmi Raut, concludes that a policy of free preschool for all poor children would have a raft of cost-effective benefits for society and the economy: It would increase social mobility, reduce income inequality, raise college graduation rates, improve criminal behavior (saving some of the societal expenses associated with it), and yield higher tax revenue thanks to an increase in lifetime wages. via The Atlantic, published June 17, 2013.

When Catastrophe Strikes, Emulate the Octopus ~ Nature teaches us that adaptation to environmental risk carries no goal of perfection. In human society, it’s politically expedient to propose top- down security initiatives that promise total risk elimination, such as “winning the global war on terror.” But trying to eliminate a threat like terrorism is like trying to eliminate predation, and trying to minimize it with a single, centralized plan is the direct opposite of adaptability. Well-adapted organisms do not try to eliminate risk—they learn to live with it. via Wired, published March 21, 2012.

Students Transform a Parking Spot In Front of Their School Into a Cool Parklet ~ As a technology teacher at Jericho Middle School in Long Island, New York, Matthew Silva is constantly looking for ways to infuse design thinking and process into his curriculum. With this goal in mind, he recently challenged his students to solve a problem for their school. Their challenge was to design a parklet for a parking space in front of the school where students wait every day for their parents to pick them up. via Inhabitat, published June 17, 2013.

Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation ~ Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation is a five-week course that will introduce you to the concepts of human-centered design and help you use the design process to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change. No prior design experience necessary. Brought to you by Acumen & IDEO.org. Register now!

Browser that allows people around the world to surf the internet together in one window ~ What if you and your friends (or complete strangers) shared a browser? What sites would you visit and how would you communicate with one another? Swedish artist Jonas Lund explores those questions in his most recent project We See in Every Direction. As part of Rhizome’s online exhibition series The Download, Lund built a browser that allows people around the world to surf the internet together in one window. Users appear as cursors and can click around to different URLs, type messages in search bars or just sit back and observe what’s happening on the web. via Wired, published June 14, 2013.

EYE AM: Teaching Kids in Developing Countries to Tell Their Stories Through Photography ~ Todays media often creates an unfair picture of the lives of kids in developing countries – how they live and who they are. Poverty. No individuality. No creativity. But that’s a picture that isn’t created by those who really know what it looks like. The kids themselves. Together with you, we’ll create a more realistic view of the world. via Petapixel, published June 15, 2013.

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“What must we do differently to develop the capacities of many more of our young people to be innovators?”

In this talk from the 2012 TEDxNYED conference, Tony Wagner, Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and author of several books on transforming education for the 21st century, argues that in the new global ‘knowledge economy’, where knowledge has become a commodity, “what the world cares about is not what you know but what you can do with what you know, and that is a completely different education problem.” The question then becomes, “what must we do differently to develop the capacities of many more of our young people to be innovators?”

Wagner identifies a set of seven core competencies that “every young person must be well on the way to mastering before he or she finishes high school, not just to get a good job, but to be a continuous learner and an active and informed citizen in the 21st century”. They are:

Critical thinking & problem solving

Collaboration across networks & leading by influence

Agility & adaptability

Initiative & entrepreneurialism

Effective oral & written communication

Accessing & analyzing information

Curiosity & imagination

Wanting to learn more about how these seven core competencies could be facilitated and cultivated, Wagner interviewed a wide range of young innovators in their 20s across various disciplines and industries as well as their parents to uncover any potential patterns in the young innovators’ upbringing and learning culture. He also asked each of the young innovators whether there had been teachers or mentors who had made a significant difference in their lives. Rather shockingly, one-third of all the innovators interviewed could not identify a single teacher or mentor. Also alarming, when Wagner went to interview each of the teachers and mentors that the other two-thirds of innovators had identified, he found that every single one of them was an outlier in his or her institution.

After conducting the interviews, Wagner did see a significant pattern emerge in how these adults had fostered the skills and motivation necessary to become innovators in the young people he had interviewed: “play to passion to purpose.” Which led him to conclude, “the culture of schooling, as we have grown up with it, is radically at odds with the culture of learning that produces innovators in five essential respects.” They are:

Culture of learning is about passive consumption vs. Culture of innovation is about creating real products for real audiences

Extrinsic incentives for learning vs. Intrinsic Motivation

What I found particularly interesting about Wagner’s talk is the fact that while I agree 150 percent with the insights he shares about the direction education and the learning culture should be taking in the 21st century, I fundamentally disagree with his opening remark, when he says, “I would like to respectfully suggest that our schools are not failing, they certainly don’t need reforming. The system is obsolete and needs reinventing, not reforming.” This notion that we must start from scratch, begin again or create a new foundation in order to achieve something innovative and thriving is one that keeps coming up and which we find unrealistic and detrimental, here at rethinked…*. It should come as no surprise given our name that the belief that rethinking is greater than inventing is a founding principle that underlies all of our work. So often these days, especially in the education reform debate, we hear people calling for a complete reinvention of the system–do away with classrooms, do away with teachers… These solutions are often unrealistic in terms of widespread implementation and rarely account for the wide spectrum of learning styles and differences in our students. Starting over is a luxury that we do not have. To be fair, Wagner does emphasize what each one of us can do as individuals–whether as parents, mentors, or teachers–to bridge the gap between the current culture of schooling and the culture of learning that fosters innovators (hint: model the desired behavior). And when he speaks of the need to reinvent the system, he’s talking about the underlying principles of our education culture rather than the brick and mortar educational system. Yet, the notion of sustainability does have an important place even in the sometimes abstract world of ideas. While it is disheartening to think that of all the young innovators Wagner interviewed, only two-thirds could identify a significant teacher or mentor, and that in every single case, these mentors were outliers in their fields, the fact is, they were still there–they are already a part of the system. It’s not so much about reinventing the wheel as much as finding ways to amplify, cultivate and facilitate the nuggets of potential already strewn throughout the system. I’d love to hear your take on the rethinking vs. inventing debate in the comments section below.

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How Awe Can Help Students Develop Purpose ~ Research suggests that inducing awe in the classroom might inspire kids to find a sense of purpose in life. via Greater Good Science Center, published June 11, 2013.

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In this short engaging TED talk from 2011, co-author of GameStorming: A Playbook for Rule-breakers, Innovators and Changemakersand Bright Spot I.D. founder and creative director,Sunni Brown, urges her audience to rethink…* the value of doodling. Noting that, “there is a powerful cultural norm against doodling in settings in which we’re supposed to learn something,” Brown aims to disrupt the current cultural status of doodling as a childish time waster. Highlighting some of the cognitive benefits of doodling–enhanced focus, creative problem solving and deep information processing–Brown argues “doodling is really to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think,” and, “it is a tool that we need to remember and to relearn.”

{ truths }

“I think that our culture is so intensely focused on verbal information that we’re almost blinded to the value of doodling.”

“Doodling is an incredibly powerful tool and it is a tool that we need to remember and to relearn.”

“People who doodle when they’re exposed to verbal information, retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts. We think doodling is something you when you lose focus, but in reality it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus.”

“It [doodling] has a profound effect on creative problem solving and deep information processing. There are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions:

Visual

Auditory

Reading/Writing

Kinesthetic

Now, in order for us to really chew on information and do something with it, we have to engage at least two of these modalities or we have to engage one of those modalities coupled with an emotional experience. The incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four learning modalities simultaneously with the possibility to have an emotional experience.”

“Under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom, or a boardroom or even the war room. On the contrary, doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high.”

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“The great teams really work hard at it. They cultivate specific habits that they do that makes them great.”

In this fantastic talk from last year’s 99u Conference, SYPartners chairman & founder, Keith Yamashita, highlights nine positive habits of great team culled from SYPartners two decades of collaboration with over a thousand teams. Yamashita lists the top nine habits of great teams and shares some strategies for building the capabilities necessary to fully access and master these nine habits.

SYPartners has also been in the process of developing an app, titled Teamworks, which will act as ” a set of tools to spark teams to work at their very best.” While the Teamworks app, currently in private beta, will not be released until later this year, you can download free of charge SYPartner’s previous app, Unstuck, a “new in-the-moment approach to personal growth for anyone who wants to live better every day. Combining personalized digital tools with tips and know-how from a community of other people facing stuck moments, Unstuck makes it easy to get on-demand coaching whenever you need it.”

SUPERPOWERS ~ Great teams, when they really are at their best, start first with the foundation of each person on their team understanding their superpower–what they do better and more extraordinarily than anyone else on their team.

PURPOSE ~ The habit of purpose-making–what does this mean? Why should we care? Why is this interesting? That purpose-making turns out to be absolutely essential to how teams become great.

FORCES ~ Great teams see the forces at play and capitalize on them.

BELIEF ~ Whatever your definition of greatness is, it almost always requires building belief in others so that they’ll take action.

DECISIONS ~ Decisions of how we need to work together become vital.

BOLD MOVES ~ Great teams don’t try to do everything, they focus on the most important things.

‘DUOS‘ { TRUST } ~ We have a particular term at SYPartners which we call “Duo”, it’s the smallest atomic unit of trust. It’s you and me, we have nowhere else to shovel the blame.

REFRAME ~ A team’s resilience, it’s ability to reframe something to make it positive becomes an essential habit.

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“All genuine art approaches something which is eloquent but which we cannot altogether understand. Eloquent because it touches something fundamental. How do we know? We do not know. We simply recognize.

Art cannot be used to explain the mysterious. What art does is to make it easier to notice. Art uncovers the mysterious. And when noticed and uncovered, it becomes more mysterious. I suspect writing about art is a vanity, leading to sentences like the above. When words are applied to visual art, both lose precision. Impasse.” – John Berger | ” Branching Out” | Berger On Drawing (2005)

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This brilliant three minute animated rethinking…* of Werner Herzog‘s 1982 masterpiece, Fitzcarraldo, shot and edited by Robin Frohardt, made my day. Fitzcarraldo, one of my absolute favorite films, tells the story of a man–Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald–and the absurd grandiose dream of building an opera house in Iquitos, Peru that consumes him. To finance his dream, Fitzgerald decides to open up a tract of rubber trees on a completely inaccessible parcel of land. Ever the wild dreamer and constant rethinker…* of the impossible, Fitzgerald attempts to remedy this accessibility issue by hauling a large steamer over a mountain from one branch of the river to the other. Featuring the hauling of the steamboat, Frohardt’s animation, done all in cardboard, adds an extra dose of whimsy and delight to an already incredible story that explores imagination, passion, creativity and the realities of translating dreams into action.